Posts Tagged ‘tony schwartz’

During the 2010 Winter Olympics, I was glued to watching athletes compete each night. To me, these events aren’t ever as exciting as the Summer Olympics, although, the more events I watched this year, the more I enjoyed the historical significance of the Olympic games.

Book: The Power of Full Engagement

At one specific point during the an event there was a delay to the actual competition and in interviewing a top competitor for this specific event the athlete said that he was just trying to remain calm and focused while waiting. After training for the past four years for these games, he was hoping to time his performance so that he would peak at the right moment.

Peaking has everything to do with energy and focus and mastering your energy and focus is an additional topic I would like to hit on regarding The Power of Full Engagement. (see previous article here) Loehr and Shwartz build their book up to one of several points, all of which point at our use and recovery of energy.

Life, in all phases that I can think of, deals with some sort of energy exertion. If we recognize this principle, it does a lot for recognizing our moments of being exhausted or simply out of energy. Loehr and Shwartz attempt to educate us on how to maximize our energy by frequently recovering it during our exerting it.

Positive rituals become a means of accomplishing this. After careful observation, Loehr and Schwartz identify how top performing athletes in the professional sports leagues complete so effectively by have very short recovery periods, frequently. In some cases, the recovery was a ten to fifteen second period, where a positive ritual was observed and thus the energy tanks were capped off again.

The downtime that positive rituals gives is the first stage for energy recovery, however it does not touch the surface of what is needed in order to recover. Seconds doe not do what a good nights sleep can do, however, but following a routine of positive influence on your body and mind enables the significant recovery.

Positive Rituals

Just as when a top free-throw shooter maintains a routine for recovery so she can focus on her shot, the energy required to focus intensely come just before the shot. Everyone has seen this and understand the concept. Bouncing the ball three times, visualizing the ball falling through the net and hitting the net, taking a couple deep detoxifying breathes, bending the knees, and flowing through the shot. This may be your routine and it may have been the highest free-throw percentage shooter in the NBA’s routine. Regardless, any and all routines will be unique to the person.

To work effectively in a job that makes you sit in front of a computer all day may be completely draining after a couple hours of work and the performance begins to drop off. Effective energyrecovery becomes the solution. Holding positive energy renewals like walking to the drinking fountain and back, listening to a rejuvenating song, closing your eyes and taking ten deep breaths. There are several ways to create a repeatable, positive, ritual that can become a routine for rejuvenation.

The refilling of your energy tank will lead to not just peaking once or a couple times each day, but will enable a cycle of continual peaking throughout the day.

Consider the benefits of excelling throughout the day. What would you accomplish? What would you become?

Roller coaster riding through life takes as much out of you as the amusement rides at a park. Whatever it may be that causes energy to do, we have ups – moments of purity, and we have downs – times when we are just down, lost, whatever.

Significance

Book: The Power of Full Engagement

The rides up and down, have to and will happen but the thing about them is that they don’t have to be as dramatic. The ups can be as high as we would like, but the falls don’t have to be as low as they currently are.

James Loehr and Tony Schwartz author an explanation of the energy fluctuations that everybody experiences and why we cannot sustain a steady flow of high performance.

The answers begin with concept that every period of extreme or continuous high performance resides is only as good as the time spent in recovery. This doesn’t mean that both are equitable, but that they are both necessary. Just as a physical work out requiring unusually high exertion of effort will rip the smallest muscle fibers, the recovery of 1 to 2 days will not only rebuild the muscle, but make it stronger in the body’s anticipation of having to sustain that sort of effort again.

James Loerh

Getting back more than what was put in, is always a smart investment. In the same breath, too much recovery time will atrophy the muscle, weakening it so it will not be able to sustain the previous performance.

This is applicable to all types of energy efforts. Whether you are a mom or dad trying to balance the household duties of kids and laundry and dinner and whatever, or whether you are a professional athlete needing to excel on a regular basis in order to maintain the huge contract you just signed. If creating through mental concentration is what is needed

Tony Schwartz

continually, a recovery is just and valuable as the genius idea.

How to? Well, there is a science to that, so check the next posting for it.